On Friday, 18 June 2010, at 14:01:05 (-0400), Jeff Johnson wrote: > Should I go to the effort of a run-time "features" acquisition API?
IMHO, no. Any time you add fluff, you get further away from the meat, and there's room for error. The least error-prone approach is to check for X when you use X, check for Y when you use Y, etc., or at least check for the most recently-added of X, Y, and Z. But the moment you start checking for symbol Q which is supposed to indicate the presence of X but isn't actually X, gratuitous abstraction and potential for mistakes are introduce for no (again, IMHO) gain. Of course, in reality, whatever the documentation examples show as the "right way to check for POPT 2.0" is precisely what will be copied-and-pasted into code for the next half-century. But you know this better than I. Michael -- Michael Jennings (a.k.a. KainX) http://www.kainx.org/ <[email protected]> Linux Server/Cluster Admin, LBL.gov Author, Eterm (www.eterm.org) ----------------------------------------------------------------------- "A lot of times, men do things they don't want to do so the woman they're going out with will do things *they* don't want to do." -- Tim Allen ______________________________________________________________________ POPT Library http://rpm5.org Developer Communication List [email protected]
